Fictionist JOSÉ Y. DALISAY JR. collects his short stories in Oldtimer and Other Stories (1984), Sarcophagus and Other Stories (1992), Penmanship and Other Stories (1995), and The Island (1997), and his written the novel Killing Time in a Warm Place (1992). He has received awards from the Ten Outstanding Young Men, the CCP Centennial Honors for the Arts, Palanca, Graphic, Free Press, Famas, Catholic Film Award, National Book Award and the David TK Wong Fellowship for Creative Writing. He was inducted into the Palanca Hall of Fame Award in 2000.
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Yabes listed the major sources of inspiration for prewar Filipino authors as he divined them from the work at hand, grouping them into about six kinds of authors or stories. He mentioned Edgar Allan Poe, Guy de Maupassant, O.
Henry (“a single unity of impression”); Sherwood Anderson (“plot development [subordinated] to character delinea-tion”); Ernest Hemingway (“reportorial... staccato... the considerable use of suggestion [and] indirecdelinea-tion”); Wilbur Daniel Steele (whose “fifth act” unfolds to reveal a web of incidents in the past); William Saroyan (“a formless structure-less exercise of literary composition... a travesty upon the traditional story”); and Dorothy Parker (an “infection” of “the virus of sophistication”).
Yabes moved on to observe that “... The great majority of the distinctive stories of the early years were love stories,” a factor he attributed to the youth of the writers themselves. “A considerable number of the early stories had for background the remote past, the pre-Spanish days.... The young writers spun tales of love about legendary persons, thereby hoping to invest their stories with an atmosphere of romance.... Some other writers, however, saw the possi-bilities of the immediate scene and set out to exploit them.” It was in apprehending this “immediate scene” that Yabes found great virtue in the work of Manuel Arguilla, whom Yabes lionized early on as the best of his generation: “Of all Filipino story tellers his perhaps is the only really authentic voice. He is unashamedly Filipino.” After the war, Yabes would qualify his admiration of Arguilla’s fiction somewhat, noting that other postwar writers had also taken to confronting social issues, and that some seemingly ephemeral productions had surprisingly endured.
Overall, Yabes felt that Filipino short story writers in English were getting better. In 1975, re-evaluating his earlier choices, Yabes wrote that “... One could say with pride that the better of the post-war stories are definitely of a quality superior to that of the better of the pre-war stories.” Still later, introducing the sequel to his first anthology, Yabes noted a certain broadening of vision occasioned by the overwhelming realities of the ‘40s and ‘50s: “... War and the Japanese occupation, restoration of the Commonwealth government in Manila, proclamation of independence, birth of the Republic, euphoria and disenchantment.... An interesting feature of this anthology... is the presence of stories set in foreign lands with Filipinos as main characters. This reflects the widening of the horizons of Filipino experience.”
Yabes also took the opportunity to emphasize the currency if not the primacy that English had gained over the islands in eight decades of use: “The present collection is more truly national than any similar anthology that could be collected of stories originally written in Pilipino or in any other native language or in Spanish.”
There are a few points that, by way of summary, I myself would like to emphasize from this overview of our years of matriculation and early success in the short story in English.
First, we not only learned the English language quickly and well; we told many fine and memorable stories in it that have since become an inalienable part of the collective imagination we call our heritage, stories whose level of artistic and technical accomplishment we continue to aspire to.
Second, and as the critical literature will bear out vividly, the short story in English became an important site of political engagement between those like Villa who sought to produce a breathlessly transcendent art, and those like Salvador R. Lopez (who wrote poetry but whose fiction, if any, I am unaware of) who sought to infuse literature with a revolutionary mission and passion. (Parenthetically, let’s not forget that the choice and the decision itself to write in English is one fraught with political implications.)
The third point—somewhat on the downside of things—I leave to Mojares, who has put it more succinctly than I possibly can, in his study of the development of the Filipino novel:
“The rise of English to prominence, with its attendant factors, sharpened the fragmentation of the audience, relegated vernacular fiction to the lower rungs of the cultural ladder, hampered the growth of the vernaculars in artistry, and alienated to a significant extent English writers from the popular culture.”
Between the largely school-based masters of the canon as defined by Yabes and the present batch of apprentices in their 20s, we have a motley crew of beatniks, Jesuits, hippies, ninjas, escapees from convent and monastery, commu-nists, femicommu-nists, machos, gays, theorists, chess players and cardsharps—among others.
After Alfon came Gregorio C. Brillantes, Gilda Cordero-Fernando, and Kerima Polotan, their stories and their prose exhibiting both surface luminosity and material depth, surveying the social landscape with wit, irony, a sense of things passing and things lost. They would be closely followed by a new group of writers set off by a deliberate and sometimes overpowering reverence for the turn of phrase. Thus we meet Erwin E. Castillo, Wilfrido Nolledo, Wilfredo Sanchez, Cesar Ruiz Aquino, Alfred A, Yuson, and Jose Ayala, much of their work seeking virtue in conscious artifice of language and situation. Their stories strike me today as heavily impressionistic meditations, melodramatic in their own way, plaintive, not without charm or humor, but often culturally disembodied, except for Castillo’s Cavite. I should add that this was also about the time that Ninotchka Rosca began writing and building up a head of steam.
Some of these stories and their writers were introduced and remain forever green in the PEN Anthology of 1962, edited by Francisco Arcellana, who acknowledged that they were his personal choices. No less interesting is Arcellana’s explanation that PEN undejztook a collection of stories before any other genre because “the consensus is that the Filipino short story in English is the most impressive in achievement.”
In 1965, the Ateneo-based Philippine Studies came out with a special issue devoted to new writing in English, a project the journal would repeat in 1985 and in 1995. I was unable to secure copies of the 1965 issue (edited by Gilda Cordero-Fernando) and the 1995 issue (edited by Eric Torres) in time for this paper, but I must confess to being rather familiar with the 1985 issue, having had a story published there.
Not surprisingly, the 1985 issue was dominated by political concerns—martial law had technically been lifted,
but Marcos was still in full control of government if not his bladder. The assassination of Ninoy Aquino in 1983 became, for many writers in English, a turning point, a wake-up call. As Alice Guillermo noted in her introduction, the decade covered by that issue was one during which “writers and artists found that they could not long divorce themselves from the historical process.”
Let me mention another, and more recent, anthology of Filipino short fiction in English, excluding individual collections. I refer to Catfish Arriving in Little Schools (Pasig: Anvil Publishing, 1996), which includes the work of three writers: Gina Apostol, Jaime An Lim, and Clinton Palanca. I should also mention the first issue of a literary journal called Chimera, which features stories by seven authors, variations all on a theme by Eros.
This new generation of Filipino short story writers would be 40 and below; indeed many of them are only in their 20s. They include Eric Garnalinda, Charlson Ong, Gina Apostol, Danton Remoto, Clinton Palanca, Jessica Zafra, Romina Gonzalez, Lakambini Sitoy, Katrina P. Tuvera, Mailin Paterno, Timothy Montes, Connie Jan Maraan, Angelo Lacuesta, Noelle de Jesus, and Luis Katigbak—among many others, I’m sure, some of whom are simply waiting to get their first few stories published and their first book out.
The names may ring few bells—not yet, not mostly” —but Philippine literary history will look back to the ‘80s and early ‘90s and recall the emergence of these writers, their explosive talent, and their exhilarating array of subjects and styles. They aren’t the only ones writing, of course—some of the best new recent writing has come from Carlos Aureus, Gémino, Abad, Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, Alfred A. Yuson and Joy Dayrit, as well as N.VM. Gonzalez and Lina Espina-Moore. But we are clearly in the presence of a new generation whose collective burden may be finding what they are all about. If earlier writers lost faith in God and the State, and then afterwards in Mao who was both godhead and head of state, what is one left to believe and disbelieve?
In terms of form, the contemporary Filipino short story writer in English—and I daresay also in Filipino—has had many new models to choose from, beyond Poe, beyond Anderson, beyond Maugham, Chekhov, Faulkner, Hemingway, Saroyan, Flannery O’Connor, Updike, Salinger, and Cheever.
Ask these people whom they read, or who their models are, and they will give you names like Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino, Milan Kundera, Woody Allen, Nadine Gordimer, Margaret Atwood, Raymond Carver, David Leavitt, Jamaica Kincaid, Bharati Mukherjee, James Hamilton Paterson, Jayne Anne Phillips, Maya Angelou, Salman Rushdie, John Barth, William Gibson, J. M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan, and A. M. Homes.
True, their inspirations remain largely Western; but even the Western writers they look up to are dissident voices, or remakers of form. Perhaps more tellingly, many of these young writers seem to know little about, and have little to do with, Southeast Asia and its culture, or—except for the very highly-educated—with the classical and historical past.
Let me venture some gross generalizations about these writers, as only a hasty overview like this can allow me to do:
Their politics will be bourgeois-liberal; very few will profess an active solidarity with the barefooted, bush-whacking Marxism of old. Their locales and sensibilities are overwhelmingly urban, even crosscontinental. They are generally well-schooled, well-read, and well-traveled, which lends their work a certain consciousness of form, a delibera-tion of design.
Their chosen issues tend to be those of gender and sexuality, the environment, cultural identity, and individual freedom. They have material aplenty, but seemingly no single, defining experience, in the way that the War or the First Quarter Storm was for their predecessors. (It’s arguable, of course, if a generation really needs one.) If they are “lost”-as most generations at some point claim, to be-they do not show it by screaming; their response to aggravation is rarely anger, but irony and wit, perhaps withdrawal. They stand on the brink of strong emotion, suspicious or fearful of what lies beyond.
They possess a deftness of language that comes not only from reading, but also from speaking and listening to the language all the time; it is an English inflected with the resonances and accents of ’pop culture, the Internet, the stock market, and yet also of that home in the province that no one ever quite leaves behind.
But it is the stories themselves which must finally count, and there are many which do: these past few years, I have been happy to come across the playful postmodernism of Joy Dayrit; Charlson Ong’s ventures into and among the Chinese-Filipino; Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo’s and Mailin Paterno’s troubling tales; Lakambini Sitoy’s skillfully argued feminist tracts; Romina Gonzalezs excursions into backyard fantasies; Clinton Palanca’s pensive explorations into other people’s rooms.
For sheer gift of language, Clinton Palanca—the youngest and perhaps most erudite of them all—seems matchless; but his work also demonstrates the tentativeness of the age; with Palanca, the language is often the material; the story is not so much in the spider but the web.
At this point, as I did earlier, let me run through some fundamental observations about the contemporary Filipino short story in English:
First, in terms of form, it derives its inspirations from a whole new set of writers and ways of writing—still predominantly Western, but no longer so stolidly canonical.
Second, in terms of content, the new stories deal largely with the bewildering variety of our unfolding experi-ence—OCWs and the Filipino diaspora, the war in the countryside, the alienation of the middle class, the Chinese and the Others among us, our connections to the supernatural and to the afterlife, the tangled web of our personal relation-ships, including our sexuality, and Artmaking itself as subject.
Third, in terms of treatment or approach, this generation is an eclectic lot; while realism remains a strong and dominant strain, many new stories have assumed the forms and mindsets of magic realism, metafiction, minimalism,
colonial guilt; quite a number of them write bilingually. Indeed we are witnessing the continuing de-Americanization of English, its appropriation by Filipino writers for Filipino subjects and purposes.
Fifth, in terms of publication and of spreading the faith (or the virus), the Filipino writer today can look forward to being published in quite a number of magazines and journals, to attending a growing circuit of workshops, and to receiving various grants and fellowships. Literary publishing has been undergoing a boomlet of sorts, and a few universities now offer degrees and courses in creative writing. These, for the Filipino writer, are pretty good times.
For all that, the Filipino short story in English—the writing and the reading of it—remains an elitist and middle-class enterprise enjoyed by a very few, because very few Filipinos among the middle class whose anxieties make up the stuff of our fiction truly want to read about themselves. Alienation and commercialism will not bed together.
And here, as I have noted elsewhere, is ironically where our freedom lies: divested of commercial considerations and restraints, and never having had a real market to satisfy, the Filipino writer in English has been relatively free to boldly and blithely go where almost no one else will bother going.
The discoveries, thankfully, are often well worth the loneliness.
REFERENCES
Apostol, Gina, Jaime An Lim, and Clinton Palanca. Catfish Arriving in Little Schools. Ed. Ricardo M. de Ungria. Pasig: Anvil Publishing, 1996.
Arcellana, Francisco. Introduction. PEN Short Stories. Ed. Arcellana. Manila: Philippine Chapter, International Pen, 1962.
Chimera 1:1 (1996).
Cuyugan, Tina, ed. Forbidden Fruit. Pasig: Anvil Publishing, 1994.
Garcia, J. Neil C. and Danton Remoto, eds. Ladlad: An Anthology of Philippine Gay Writing. Pasig: Anvil Publishing, 1994.
Guillermo, Alice. “The Temper of the Times: A Critical Introduction.” Philippine Studies 33 (1985): 269-75.
Mojares, Resil B. Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel: A Generic Study of the Novel Until 1940. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1983.
“Rules Governing the Commonwealth Literary Contests.” Philippine Magazine 37:4 (April 1940): 147.
Yabes, Leopoldo Y, ed. Philippine Short Stories 1925-1940. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1975.
————, ed. Philippine Short Stories 1941-1955, Part I (1941-1949). Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1981.